by David Wiltse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 1992
A prequel showing how, before FBI Special Agent John Becker tangled with the psychopathic killer of Prayer for the Dead (1991), he was pitted against a psychopathic political assassin on the loose in New York. The assassin is Roger Bahoud, who's been hired to kill an unnamed statesman during the UN ceremonies on the Year of the Child—and kill him in such a way that an ineffectual fringe group, the Brotherhood of Zion, will be blamed. Bahoud, an abused child who turned on his father and went on to kill half a dozen men by sticking them in the ear with pointed wires, is one scary guy—but then so is Becker, who's good at his job because he feels the same unholy excitement that his murderous prey feel. As Bahoud makes his way from the Mideast to Poland to Canada to New York, a lucky break at the Canadian border crossing—the victim Bahoud had killed for his passport is discovered ahead of schedule—puts Becker on his trail. As Bahoud goes to ground (under the wildly unconvincing alias Meyer Kane) with the unwitting Brotherhood's chicken-hearted leader Howard Goldsmith and his crippled sister Myra—duping Howard and his Keystone terrorists into leading an attack on a dying former PLO intimate and killing the old man after they've spray-painted his mosque with Zionist graffiti—Becker follows the trail of corpses—the playwright client of Myra's who hinted that he worked for the government; the Brotherhood member who threatened to turn Kane in—to the obligatory scene in the Goldsmiths' place as Bahoud is zeroing in on his target though a rifle scope. The battle of psychos doesn't look nearly as original in an antiterrorist setting as it did in Prayer for the Dead—but Wiltse evokes the creepy intensity of the hunter and his prey as well as anybody who's worked that genre in years.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13718-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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